Hist 2700 - Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel

Xuanming Fang

HIST 2700

2/22/2016

Book Review

Diamond believes that geography determines the basis for the survival of civilizations, and geography created different development trajectories and speed of the civilizations. Intentionally or unintentionally, Diamond takes, history, culture, tradition and religion as “the decisive factors” on secondary position. Yet we tend to see most obvious reasons from these factors supporting today's civilized form.

The strength of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it seems make a lot of sense for most people from the first look and it seems to explain why European countries are stronger than other continents in general. There’s no doubt that Jared Diamond did a great job on explaining why Eurasia were ahead of other continents on form civilizations.

Many people criticize Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, most believe that it avoided some major problems intentionally because he cannot provide any evidences such as attributing any human motivation for what human chose to do, some believe that he is a racist. I found that Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel converging with Airs, Waters, and Places in many ways. Ironically, Airs, Waters, and Places is a typical scientific racism example.

Second idea in Airs, Waters, and Places is waters. Water has been categorized into several different kinds in Airs, Waters, and Places, such as wholesome and unwholesome and the water clearness is one of the most important determinant of whether the water is good or bad. Climate is the factor that drives the water to be unclear, too hot can cause water to appear without proper color and contain bile; too cold can cause water contain phlegm which was known as the major disease causer of the four humors by Hippocrates. These evidences do not stand in present world.

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a more thoroughly explained complementary to Hippocrates’ places idea. The climate differences between different regions drives the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, and Places entire book and the causation of the climate differences is geography which happens to converge with Jared Diamond’s environmental determinism. The “Lucky latitude” provides variety of species that can be domesticated, especially corps. Diamond also proposed his Anna Karenina principle which does not apply on majority of the mammals existed in America, out of 14 domesticated mammals, llama is the only species America had. Limited food sources--corps and mammals, also limits the development of written languages in America. Abundant species of domesticated mammals helped Europeans build up better immune system. These evidences perfectly add up to Hippocratic Airs, Waters, and Places, and make up the false part of it. Both Airs, Waters, and Places and Guns, Germs, and Steel intentionally neglect or skip over non-natural factors that participated in development of civilizations.